The Talented Mr. Rockefeller

Walter Kirn reconsiders his ties to a criminal con artist

Eric Banks

As celebrity criminals go, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter isn’t a household name. But one of his aliases—Clark Rockefeller—has fueled outsize fascination ever since his tenure as a phony scion of the well-heeled clan ran out six years ago, when he was arrested for kidnapping his daughter. Books both gritty (Mark Seal’s The Man in the Rockefeller Suit) and literary (Amity Gaige’s novel Schroder) trailed along in the

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